25.06.14 17:37Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XI : The New Yorker

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June 24, 2014

Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XIPosted by Henri Cole

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This is the tenth installment of Henri Cole’s ongoing Paris diary. Past entries can be found here.

Why am I writing this all down, dear reader? My answer is that I don’t want to conceal anything or be surreptitious.Instead, I want to reveal things—everyday myths, fables, and allegories—that might otherwise remain dormant behindthe intense beauty of Paris. Recently, I watched the 1939 film made from Victor Hugo’s immortal classic “TheHunchback of Notre Dame,” set at the end of the fifteenth century. The cast includes the English actor Charles Laughtonas the kind, pitiable, but misunderstood Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of the Notre-Dame Cathedral, who savesEsmeralda (played by Maureen O’Hara), the Roma street dancer (or gypsy, as she refers to herself), who is framed for amurder. With her goat, Esmeralda charms everyone but feels that because of her race she has been denied security,happiness, a good home, and prosperity. The film asserts soberly that we are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb.The Middle Ages have come to a close, and France is ravaged by a hundred years of war, but there is hope among itscitizens. Unfortunately, there is superstition, too, about a new form of expression and thought known as Gutenberg’sprinting press, but King Louis XI is not superstitious. “Out there … all over France, in every city, there stand cathedralslike this one, triumphal monuments of the past … a book in stone,” he says, pointing to Notre-Dame. The King tells usthat cathedrals are “the handwriting of the past,” but “the printing press is of our time.”

This theme of the new versus the old is a recurring one in the film, in which we are told, in verse, “The old can never last./ The new is claiming its place. / It’s foolish to cling to the past. / Believe in the future’s face.” I loved many things in the

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movie, like when a character says, “Being a poet I’m already a vagabond, and I can learn quickly to be a thief.” Later, headds, “The poet doesn’t believe in force. I told you I could save you without force.” And I loved when the barely verbalQuasimodo, overcome with longing for pretty Esmeralda, says to an ugly cathedral gargoyle, “Why was I not made ofstone like thee?” As usual, the book is darker than the film, and Esmeralda is not saved on her way to the gallows buthanged instead. After she is entombed, years later, a hunchbacked skeleton is found entangled with hers.

* * *

Light penetrating the colored glass of cathedral windows was once thought to be God’s most beautiful presence amongus. “I never realized until now how ugly I am because you are so beautiful,” Quasimodo (who was abandoned as aninfant on the steps of Notre-Dame Cathedral) says mournfully to Esmerelda, who gives him a drink of water and a littlepity. We have a devilish fascination with his ugliness—we shrink from it but want to look, too. I come to Paris, in part,because of its beauty. The call of life is too strong for me to resist, and this gives me a sense of emotional well-being, butis this an evolutionarily feeling? Does it help me to survive? “Beauty,” as a noun meaning “physical attractiveness,”comes from the early fourteenth century Anglo-French beute, and as a word connoting “a beautiful woman” it originateslater in the century. “Beautician” is first recorded in American English in 1924 (in the Cleveland, Ohio, telephonedirectory). “Ugly,” as an adjective describing a “frightful or horrible” appearance, is older. It has a Scandinavian origin,probably from the Old Norse uggligr, meaning “dreadful, fearful.” In Gerard Manley Hopkins’s daring sonnet, “Pied

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Beauty,” he defines beauty as “all things counter, original, spare, strange,” which seems perfect, allowing us to praisechestnuts, cattle, trout, finches, and plotted fields.

* * *

This morning I observed a beautiful, sleeping chipmunk. Animals—like humans—seek a safe, sheltered place to sleep.Deer make a bed out of unmowed grass, rodents burrow in the soil, and apes create a pallet of leaves. In Paris, I sleepalone on a thick foam mattress. Because my dreams are incoherent, I lose any sense of time or place. Often I fly. I have toget up during REM sleep to write down my dreams, or I forget them. My eyes twitch like a dreaming cat’s, but this doesnot seem to be connected to my dreams. My eyes move because the neurons that irrigate my face muscles are notdeactivated, as they are in the rest of my long body. Mysteriously, I always get plenty of REM sleep in Paris. Therefore, Iwrite.

I wish I knew what my dreams were for. I wish I could define them. They seem to be a form of thought, or some kind ofillusion of reality. Certainly, they are a source of intense emotion, so probably they protect me from what I really feel,which would be too painful to endure. In Paris, when I sleep late like a newborn baby, I say to myself, justifying mylaziness, This is good for my brain and immune system. When I sleep, I roll over on my side and grab a big, soft Frenchpillow. This is a sign that I’m dreaming, like paws and whiskers moving about on a cat, or a dog whining and rolling its

25.06.14 17:37Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XI : The New Yorker

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eyes back behind closed lids. I hope that Paris will always be a stable place in terms of the quality and quantity of sleep. Ithink this is a compensation for the little, banal degradations of everyday life. Sleep is my idea of beauty, and I have triedto write about it in my poem “To Sleep”:

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare handthat stroked my brow, “Come along, child;stretch out your feet under the blanket.Darkness will give you back, unremembering.Do not be afraid.” So I put down my bookand pushed like a finger through sheer silk, the autobiographical part of me, the am, snatched up to a different place, where I was no longer my body but something more— the compulsive, disorderly parts of me in a state of equalization, everything sliding off—war, suicide, love, poverty—as the rebellious, mortal I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.

* * *

25.06.14 17:37Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XI : The New Yorker

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Yesterday, I took a thermal photograph of my friend and translator, Claire Malroux. I was looking at her the way acreature would look at her in the night on a street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, where she lives. Animals havethermal receptors in their eyes that enable them to detect heat sources from a distance. Seeing Claire like this remindedme of when I was sixteen and took opiates that were too strong for my young mind, so I lay in bed for three days like afoolish creature, in a coma. I find I do not want or need to see the heat sources of the people I love, as a serpent seesthem. I do not have to see the way a barn owl, a rat, or a moth sees in the dark because of the special rods in their eyes. Inthe backs of my eyes, I have a bright tapestry of human blood vessels. That’s why they are red when I am photographedwith a flashbulb. I do not want to lose this human dimension, even after my good strong chin is gone and I live like agargoyle in a nursing home, smelling of urine, feces, and other secretions.

Because much of what I hope to achieve is still before me, I am always aspiring to to say something true in anatmosphere of beauty (beauty again!), connecting my inner and outer space. I think that as long as I have this innerdimension I will want to create something out of language to reveal what is there—in particular, the ghastly, insane, andcruel things around me. Perhaps poetry is a kind of thermal photography of man in the world.

* * *

25.06.14 17:37Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XI : The New Yorker

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Today a man was weeping next to me at the brasserie. He was young and drinking a Coke with a lemon slice bobbing init. Every few minutes he wiped the tears from his cheeks and looked at me apologetically. He was wearing snug denimpants and his sideburns were neatly trimmed. Had he seen his future in the bar mirror, I wondered? Had his young body,by unfair election, been touched by the incurable virus that has touched so many in my lifetime? Did he need a doctor? Iwas not at all prepared to encounter him, like a figure from the Old Testament under olive trees, with the scent ofrosemary or lavender in the air. He seemed to float somewhere between heaven and earth. Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,Noah, and Adam were somewhere in the distance, back behind him. In the mirror, the sunshine made strange, flame-likewing patterns. On his table top, a little bouquet of colorful posies made flames, too. He seemed super real to me, becausethere was nothing unreal about him or his sorrow. I wanted to speak to him but was afraid. We were both alone, andwaiters hurried past, ignoring us. The young man had moist green eyes, like rough emeralds. Outside, in the square, a bigscarred plane tree was shaking its branches. On the horizon, swollen clouds moved quickly. Nearby, on the pavement, acrow pushed its yellow beak into a seeping pink trash bag. I ordered a bowl of wild strawberries, which are in season,and took out my notebook and pen, because I didn’t know what else to do. Why do the gods make sport of playing withus? We are all born in a womb and end up in a tomb, I wrote down.

25.06.14 17:37Street of the Iron Po(e)t, Part XI : The New Yorker

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Henri Cole is the author of eight collections of poetry. His new book, “Nothing to Declare,” is forthcoming from Farrar,Straus, and Giroux. He teaches at Ohio State University and is the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Photographs courtesy Henri Cole.

Keywords

Paris Diary;books;poetry

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